Need advice on new development system and OS

Question

Hi,

I am going to be starting a new job soon and the company has previously had hobbyist developers working on their applications and as such not had to worry about supplying equipment for the developers.

Having spoken to them they seem to understand that I will need a reasonable system in order to ensure I am both as productive as possible and happy working there. I will be working both in there office and from home (about 50:50) so I need to ensure that I pick a setup which allows me to work comfortable from both.

One option I have is to use a dedicated workstation at the office with dual screens which I can use in the office. As I will be using SVN I could then work on my own systems at home so long as I make sure I check my code in every night.

Another option is for them to get me a new laptop which would be something like (dual core, 4gb ram, 1920x1200) and an external monitor so I can at least use 2 screens (even if they are not the same size)

Another option I am toying with right now, as I need to replace my old work laptop (I work freelance in addition to this job) is to finally make the move over to OS X and get myself a Mac Book Pro. Therefore my thought here would be to see if they are willing to buy a 27" iMac which I can use to run some VM's etc in along with other services (db, unit testing etc) and I can then use its monitor with the Macbook while at the office.

I could then take the work to and from the office and hook up the laptop to monitors at home and have a dedicated machine to run other intensive tasks.

I am hoping someone can help me decide which route would be best to try and recommend the company to go. In summary the options are:

• A dedicated dual screen workstation
• A dedicated work laptop and external monitor
• A compromise with me supplying the laptop and them a desktop/monitor

In all 3 I would hope to still be able to edit and maintain code etc from home with code being in SVN. I think the main issues will be where email and documents go so I can have them on me all the time...maybe solved using Google apps or something

Thanks for any advice any of you might be able to provide.

Answer 1

Ideally, the monitors will have the same RGB pattern. Some monitors (e.g., Viewsonic 201b) have a "BGR" layout of the pixels on screen.

If you are using Windows with ClearType font rendering, it is important to have all monitors with the same pixel pattern -- otherwise the ClearType both looks funny, and causes a slowdown as you drag a window from one screen to the other.

I realize you might not use Windows, as you stated, but thought I would through this out to you. There could someday be similar issues with non-Windows OS. Also, I'm not sure if it matters for OSX at present, it might.

Answer 2

I have a MacBook Pro laptop and am very happy with it as a dev platform. It's a unix environment that has beautiful tools (I'm not looking at you, XCode) and is a pretty well built machine. The big advantage over using source control is that, even though SCM will allow you to work in different places (especially a distributed SCM like Git or Mercurial) the time will come when you will forget to push your changes - and if your workplace has any sort of security, going through firewalls, vpn, etc... is just a pain in the butt. I think it's much better to be able to carry your one configured machine with you.

Answer 3

You're going to want to continue to have a personal laptop. so make sure that you are the one owning the laptop no matter who pays for it. Given a choice, I'd rather own a laptop and use it part-time for business than use somebody else's laptop for my own purposes, commercial or personal, or juggle two laptops.

So, I'd ask for the best desktop development system I'd be likely to get, best being of course dependent on what you like, what you're doing, and company policy.

If you go for separate development machines at work and at home, you probably want a better system than trying to remember to check into Subversion at the end of each session. If you keep your version of the project on your laptop at all times, that would eliminate the problem. Other than that, if you could connect into your work machine from home, and your home machine from work, you could either use a distributed VCS (like Mercurial or Git) on your own machines or just log in to commit the stuff you forgot when you left last time.